I hope the people implementing all these policies and technologies are seriously weighing the consequences of their actions. I suspect that they are not.
I would suggest keeping a good relationship with your current employer and network of business contacts. If you do end up losing your job, a recession is a great time to go back to school for additional training or to get more certification. A short college program with a job placement can especially be helpful. At least, that's how I usually handle recessions. I'm trying to sync my training, so that it finishes at about the same time as the economy is improving.
This is a great idea that I had never thought of. Something that might help, if it does actually make a person feel awkward, is to use a numeric code. That way, you could be commercial301@mydomain.com and then 301 could equal Gap, or whatever you want.
You know it's kind of funny, because many former Olympic dream teams have famously fallen short from time to time. The most noteworthy is the American basketball team losing early rounds to smaller countries, but also Canadian Hockey "dream teams" being knocked out of early rounds too. Every so often there are upsets, even if you do have a "dream team".
“Upset” is usually used to refer to a one-off, when a team expected to win has been defeated by an underdog, but then the team often returns to their former level of dominance.
So your analogy suggests Netflix will quickly return to its former glory days.
I think this is premature, at best, if not incredibly optimistic. I think this is the beginning of a long uphill battle for Netflix, and that if they ever return to their former glory days, it will be much further down the road than what is a typical recover from an upset.
I’m not convinced they ever will be the same. Not even close.
This reminds me of my friends who are generally disappointed when the English team with their favorite 'premier league' players loses to other teams in the world cup.
Turns out great players in a league are playing in a specific team configuration, and the context of the league in general is very different compared to a competition between national teams at the world cup level.
I honestly think there are a lot of people that need some level of human interaction to function properly, and those are likely the people pushing for hybrid or back to office. Keep in mind, also, that not everyone's work from home situation is ideal. If you are already an established professional, and you have more than one room to create an office, then work from home is a dream come true. If you are a new hire, or student intern, sharing an apartment (even a crappy one) and your single bedroom is now your office, then work from home can feel a little like a prison sentence. But yes, likely hybrid work is a ruse, but also I wouldn't be surprised if work from home is also a ruse--imagine a scenario like this: "since your home is your office, we are going to need to monitor you on off hours and we'd also like you to start doing more overtime".
It's so much easier to discuss things face-to-face. I feel so much more energized by mere presence of other people (and I score high on any introvert/Asperger test) I was surprised myself in the last few weeks. I welcome the return to normality. Walking two feet from my bed to my desk got psychologically tough a long time ago.
Even though I have the worst commute on my team I want to be in the office a couple days a week (it's going to be 3). But our campus is great, we have real cubicles and standing desks, and even free meals.
One possible explanation is that he might be experiencing depression. It's probably not the first thing you would think of when you see scattered writing, but since it's an article about how he's unhappy, it could be a reasonable explanation. Unhappiness can definitely interfere with thinking and writing, if it's severe enough. That's just a thought. He also says the idea is "disjointed". Often too, when you are feeling uncertain about your life, it sometimes helps to put down a stream-of-consciousness collection of thoughts to see if anything provides meaning.
From reading this article further, I think this a depressed person trying to make sense of their world and emotions.
There are a lot of things. I'm actually searching out more and more refined pathways to joy each day. One specific thing that has been filling me with joy at the moment is listening to Debussy and then watching videos of art in fast forward. The combo is really something, and it got me through a very painful moment this summer. Before that, my muse was searching out videos of people walking around in tourist attractions (also in fast forward). But so many things bring me joy. Most of all creating music gives me joy, but also listening to music gives me joy. One unexpected source of joy is from the genre of music called "hash noise". It's an acquired taste, but I have a theory that listening to it opens new synapses in my mind. If you look at nature, noise can be found everywhere. Think of how relaxing the sound of waves crashing on the beach sound. That's noise. I could go on though, religion, science, reading about hardware and the occult. I think joy and meaning is, perhaps, shattered into a million pieces and you can find it almost everywhere, even in places that you would never imagine, like reaching your lowest points in life or even on websites that people think are wrong. My new goal is "Praxis", which I might define as the joy of living a very conventional life. This will be new for me, but I suspect it's a necessary step in my own personal journey.
I really appreciate the detailed response! So much to chew on :)
In particular, your points regarding music, nature, and noise, and finding joy and meaning in the most unexpected of places: so awesome!
It's actually quite inspiring that you're able to seek out so many sources of joy. I really need to do more of that as well.
A question about listening to music, if you don't mind: Do you have dedicated time where you're just listening to the music, ie not doing anything else?
I guess I'm wondering about all these things because I've been trying to figure out how to get myself into the 'mood' for joy. I struggle with calming myself down and haven't been able to just relax and do things I supposedly enjoy. Any tips on navigating that?
I have a similar freakish ability, but mine has to do with writing. I can basically ~see~ approximately three pages of prose in my mind's eye while writing. It only works under certain conditions, but it feels just like I'm transcribing something rather then doing any kind of deliberate thinking. People are shocked what comes out of me, and even more so when they see how quickly it happens. You would need to see me in person to experience the full effect, but my body does not match my words. Imagine the biggest lumberjack you've ever seen describing the petals of a flower with such high precision that it takes your breath away. That's me. I've started to slowly nurture this talent, because it finally occurred to me that it might be special.
Interesting, I have a similar ability but for code. I write some of the best code when I'm not at a computer because it doesn't take any time to refactor and I can play freely. A lot of the time when I write new code it's just transcribing the systems I created from memory. It's similar for reading code, being able to keep a lot of system complexity and behavior in my head at once. I wonder how common this is for mastery in other circumstances, like sports or art.
I know what you mean, I also "see" code in a similar way as the OP author explains numbers.
It's though mostly "blocks" that interact with other "blocks" and a large application is comprised of probably hundreds of blocks organised in specific shapes with interaction lines between them.
This helps me spot "poor" application design when blocks that should be separate are actually intertwined (tightly-coupled or concerns not separated).
It's sometimes hard to describe these in architecture documents or PR's as it seems not everyone is seeing the program on this level.
> You would need to see me in person to experience the full effect, but my body does not match my words.
It's fun, isn't it? One of the saddest things about aging is I never again will be a 17 year old blonde girl who looked like Rapunzel with a decade of programming experience in the mid-00s. The dissonance drove people insane.
Oh my god! I had the same experience in the late 2010s as a tiny little emo girl. The absolute shock in CS group projects with a bunch of guys who were upset that they “got put with the girl” when I had the whole thing done in an hour was chefs kiss.
I “booksmarted” so many guys in college who didn’t get that in real life you can put points into other stats like chr and it doesn’t take away from your int.
I think I was rolled by a min-maxxer: 20 INT and probably around 18 CHA (based on the fact that I could get 100 10 year olds to cooperate as one of them), but damn my CON and STR are so low I have constant pain debuffs to all my rolls. It's BS.
That’s interesting. I never “see” anything like that in my mind, but a few times in high school, I was explaining some geometric proof to a classmate; at the end, he noted that my verbal explanation and my finger pointing at the chart were compatible but out of sync with hand motion being about twice as fast, and then went to repeat both verbal and finger pointing, albeit at a slower rate, and they matched perfectly.
This happened more than once though not many times, and I considered it weird but kind of forgot about it.
This description makes me think I might have a mental canvas like this as well, except it might be a headless browser or something :)
Wow. I can’t "see" anything in my head. I think I have aphantasia (though I’m not really sure, I can see flashs of things but not keep them).
So I totally have to write the code to reason about it. I didn’t knew people could imagine portions of code so it explains some things. I’m not sure it bothers me or even if that’s abnormal because it’s always been like that so I can manage that. But it’s tiring.
But it also forced me to learn to be concise and to express the fullness of my thoughts through langage (or code). Which is really useful in this job.
Also, I have ADHD which I know from my psychiatrist affects short term memory. I wonder if "picturing" things happens in the same brain région than short term memory. It would explain a lot of things. Maybe I’m just some individual with broken RAM and I had to compensate with "overclocking" my CPU of thoughts. </personal-theory>
I do something similar when writing longer things like papers. I'll think about the general topics I want to cover and the order, highlights, etc., and then I can write 10 or 20 pages more or less as a continuous flow.
You know what it might be: maybe the person is a niche marketer and is going to pretend to be multiple people to sell their product to the newsletter's audience. That happens all the time. Account 1 will ask for recommendations, then account 2-6, all held by the same person, talks up the spammer's product. Although, I don't know exactly how it would work with a newsletter, I know this is very common when comment spamming.
